Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Centuries have passed and we have gone beyond “I think,
therefore I am.” Now the new credo is: I am whatever I think I am.

It’s called identity politics, but it feels more like mass
hysteria.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say that one day you walk into
class and declare to all those present that you are a baboon. It took some time
and a great deal of mental anguish, but you have finally discovered that you
are not really a human being, but a baboon. You don't look like a baboon. In fact, you look just like a human being. And yet, the baboonist interpretation explains why you don't have any friends and why you have such bad table manners. What more do you want?

After all, if a man and a woman are differentiated by 1% of
their chromosomes and if a man and a primate are differentiated by 1% of their
chromosomes, ergo… it’s just as likely that you are a baboon as that you belong
to the opposite sex.

Now, when you announce your true being, as a baboon, most of
us will probably look away, not in scorn or derision, but in pity. We will
imagine, if we know a little about psychiatry, that you are prey to some kind
of delusion, or, at best, have gotten caught up in the societal hysteria and
have convinced yourself that all of your social problems derive from the fact
that you were pretending to be a human being when you are really a baboon.

If that’s all there is, then we do not have too much of a
problem. You do, but the rest of us don’t. If, however, you add that now and
henceforth we must all treat you like a baboon and must purge from our language
any references to your apparent humanity, we will be in trouble.

Perhaps not as much of a problem as will the underage
children who are taking hormone treatments to stop them from attaining puberty,
but a problem nonetheless. For the record, what kind of a society does not
consider this to be child abuse?

In one sense this is not too difficult to understand what is
going on. I would not generalize for everyone, but certainly the intelligentsia
and those who pretend to belong to it have decided that we should no longer
live in the real world. We must inhabit a fictional kingdom where each of us
plays different roles in different plays.

While this kind of delusional thought is de rigueur in classrooms and the media,
the general public thinks that political correctness is really a bunch of bunk.
They are tired of having their thought policed and more than tired of being
accused of being criminals for using the correct pronoun.

One recalls my book, The Last Psychoanalyst, wherein I explained how Freud and the
therapy culture he spawned have been hard at work transforming mere humans into
characters in plays. I take this opportunity to note that said book will be a
perfect gift for your psychoanalyst or your therapist. With any luck your
analyst will pronounce you unanalyzable.

Identity no longer has anything to do with your identity. It’s
about playing a role in a play and convincing people that you are the
character. If they do not play along, you will find the means to punish them.

As Shakespeare put it:

All the
world’s a stage,

And all
the men and women merely players;

They
have their exits and their entrances,

And one
man in his time plays many parts,

Back in the day, Aristotle said that you are what you do,
habitually. Apparently, it had not crossed his philosophical mind that you can cancel the laws of biology
because you saw a YouTube video one day and decided that your mind and your
body were of different sexes and that your body-- thus God-- had gotten it
wrong.

You are what you do, habitually. The thought is behind
Brendan O’Neill’s reflections on the current mania:

Incapable
of reconstituting the old validation of people for what they did, or for who they became through achievement,
work, discussion, interaction and other social and political accomplishments,
society instead gives the green light to the celebration of people for their
‘traits’, or for their narrow cultural or biological identity, or, increasingly,
for who they claim to be, with little in the way of objective reasoning.

O’Neill believes that Western society has suffered a moral
collapse, one that dates back to the Vietnam period. One is hard put to
disagree:

More
importantly, it was the moral disorganisation of Western society over the past
five decades that nurtured today’s identity politics, and created a climate in
which identity has no real, felt, objective foundation but instead has become a
fleeting, unsatisfying thing unlikely to fill its adherents with anything like
a sense of achievement or true human value.

Our thought leaders have told us to feel guilty about our
culture. Having any sense of dignity or self-respect must yield to our guilt
for being part of a nation that is merely an organized criminal conspiracy.
This means that we should no longer identify as proud Americans, but must see
ourselves as citizens of the world or as members of the human species.

One must remark that being a member of the human species
requires nothing of you. Your behavior, however appalling, cannot compromise
your membership in the species. Nothing is quite as amoral as this form of speciesism.

O’Neill continues:

All
those things individuals once defined themselves through – nation, church,
work, family – have corroded in recent decades. We live in a post-national era
where shamefacedness about our nations’ pasts is preferred over questionable
national pride. A phoney cosmopolitanism that explicitly eschews ideas of
national identity is now promoted by our elites. Churches in the West are in
constant crisis, reeling from one scandal to another, and seemingly lacking the
moral resources to withstand the tidal wave of relativism. In an era when few
know (or are willing to say) what is right and wrong, churches have lost their
purchase, and shedded worshippers.

The
foundation stones on which identity was built for decades, the national flags,
religious faith, workplace meaning or class feeling through which we
constructed a sense of ourselves, through which we discovered or defined
ourselves, are gone – or are at least shaky, insecure, withering. And in such
circumstances, our sense of self can become weak; we cultivate new identities
that feel unfounded, unanchored, changeable rather than convincing.

With social support systems broken, people could only rely
on themselves. If they could no longer trust the views of other people and if
they had come to believe that all social customs had been invented to oppress
them and to deprive them of orgasms, they had nothing left but themselves. They
could even feel liberated: to define themselves, assert themselves and
finally create themselves as the beings that they truly wanted to be. They were not bound by the laws of biology; their bodies were like so much silly putty.

Christopher Lasch called it a culture of narcissism and O’Neill
takes up his point:

These
observations were taken further by the American thinker Christopher Lasch in
the 1970s, most notably in his book The
Culture of Narcissim. As a result of major quakes in the spheres of
work, family and society, a new kind of individual was emerging, argued Lasch:
one who ‘needed to establish an identity, not to submerge [his] identity in a
larger cause’. Lasch’s observation of a new climate of narcissism in place of
the old ideal of the strong-willed individual engaged in the world – John
Stuart Mill’s individual with ‘strong susceptibilities that make the personal
impulses vivid and powerful’ – was based on a recognition that the disarray of
institutional life did not free the individual to discover his ‘real self’, as
the hippies claimed it would, but rather gave rise to a new generation with a
very weakened sense of self.

Of course, the self-created individual is really a character
in a fiction. He requires an admiring audience, an audience that is willing to
suspend, as Keats said, disbelief.

O’Neill on Lasch:

He
noted that ‘apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints
does not free [us] to stand along or to glory in our individuality’. Instead,
it ‘contributes to [our] insecurity’. It leads the individual to ‘depend on
others to validate his self-esteem’, until he ‘cannot live without an admiring
audience’. Where the strong individual of the past realised himself through
engagement with the world around him, the new minimal individual merely wants
to be consoled by the world, flattered by it.

Then, these self-created individuals, individuals who have
transcended all of society’s customs and norms and traditions, who have gone
beyond biology, who claim that they do not care what anyone thinks of them,
will force everyone to accept their new being:

The new
identitarians, or self-identifiers, might technically be liberated from old
social pressures, gender norms and moral expectations – though it’s more
accurate to say that those things fell apart rather than the identitarians
having broken free of them – but they have become locked into new and even more
insidious relationships of dependency. Their need for constant validation, for
self-consolation, for an ‘admiring audience’, means that while they may be free
of past, burdensome social expectations, they have become psychic slaves. They
are dependent upon the recognition of others, especially officialdom. The
frenetic subjectivity of their identity creation disguises the extent to which
they lack any sense of genuine human subjectivity – as actors in and on and
through the world – and instead have become objects of the therapeutic
industry, maintained and even directed by the approval of institutions and
experts.

You might have guessed, and if you have read my book you
would know, that the entire enterprise is being underwritten by therapists.
They might not realize it, but this form of self-creationism derives is the
telos of the therapy culture. Therapy, by pretending to be science, gives it authority and credibility.

In O’Neill’s words:

Where
earlier celebrators of the individual emphasised our capacity for autonomy and
for governing our own minds and sense of ourselves, today’s self-identifiers
cannot exist without the blessing of new forms of therapeutic authority.

Contrast
that with today’s self-identifiers who claim words wound, that individuals are
vulnerable, that, in the words of one, ‘our mental safety is threatened by
those who question our right to exist’.

And also,

Addressing
the emergence of new, weak identities, and the corresponding creation of a
therapeutic industry and new forms of moral censure to prop up these
identities, will require more than ridiculing the new left or the so-called
‘identitarian movement’. It demands nothing less than the reconstruction of
public life, and the rediscovery of our faith in the strong individual who both
makes and is made by the world, rather than simply needing to be consoled by
it.

One does not want to give therapists too much credit. God
knows, they need forgiveness, because, as the Bible says: They know not what
they do. After all, rather than treating and curing emotional distress they have
gotten into the business of producing it.

2 comments:

I don't think we're looking at "I am whatever I think I am" rather "I am whatever I feel I am." At least that's more interesting to consider than the will power for self-transformation into what society needs you to be.

And whateer this is, it is isn't just a human problem. Like in the biology of "imprinting" a duck might think its a dog.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)

Oh here's one, although I might call "animal tricks" more on the grounds of Skinner behaviorism, positive feedback rewards, which is different than intrinsic motivations of an individual.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCU3W8RGQ_M Duck Thinks It's A Dog And Plays Fetch

We might think its silly because it doesn't follow the rules we expect, but it does seem to show behavior is more than instinct. You might also judge it as "bad" because behavior that doesn't follow the flock is unlikely to lead to effective reproductive behavior and thus is less likely to contribute to future gene pools.

And perhaps that shows the primary point of confusion. Richard Dawkins wrote a book called "The selfish gene" which at some level said that we are merely carriers of our genetic material, and our behavior is driven to reproduce. And such a drive certainly leads to the most amazing display of wasteful behavior or physical traits, usually for one gender or the other, to attract the attention of the opposite sex. And we all accept this as "normal" because we understand the need for this drive, even if we personally don't like to think it defines who we are.

So if everything is reduced to reproductive fitness and social status, then anyone who acts outside of those obvious competitive drives looks silly to us. And worse it can look dangerous to us, like how do you control an individual who isn't motivated to play along with the same rat race as everyone else?

So at some level you might also consider the "blacksheep" are those who say "I am whatever I feel I am" and it is those who want and need reproductive sex, who are willing to pretend they are whatever other people need them to be, then they're the ones who try to convince themselves "I am whatever I think I am" and follow Norman Vincent Peale's "Positive thinking" to its fullest potential.